Ideagen Risk Management vs. Vulse

Pentana is great for monitoring PIs and risks. We find it less helpful for monitoring projects (with the Actions module); it isn't quite flexible enough for our needs, though the support team have been very helpful in adding custom fields for us.

The platform is great for any team looking to improve employee advocacy internally, whether a small team or an enterprise business. If you're running a specific campaign and want your team to share relevant content, it can help you plan and share it with everyone. The Tone Match feature saves a lot of time, rather than having to create unique posts for everyone. It's also useful to have a live leaderboard of performance and to be able to create custom reports to prove the ROI of advocacy to senior leaders.

• Pentana is excellent for monitoring, recording and reporting on PIs. Very easy to use the PI module.
• Pentana is excellent for monitoring risks at various levels (service, strategic etc.). Risks are displayed very clearly in a tree structure and the module is relatively easy to use.

• Pentana could improve the free Documents module that comes with Pentana Risk. At the moment documents have to be linked to an action in order to display query results (such as how many documents are due for review) - this can be confusing for users who don't understand why there is an action linked. There is also no easy way for users to see the documents that are assigned to them.
• We would like to use the Actions module fully in order to monitor our corporate projects, but it a bit confusing for users and not very flexible when a project doesn't mirror Pentana's way of monitoring actions.

Some modules are more user-friendly than others. It's sometimes not obvious where to click to update the fields (or even that field titles can be clicked on). We have written 'Howdys' to help users. There can also seem to be a lot of steps/clicks to updating risks and actions. The Reports module on Pentana classic is certainly not user-friendly, particularly the Report Layout and Charts modules - we were told these would be integrated into the web version but this hasn't happened yet.

It's an incredibly simple platform to use, and it has just the right amount of features needed, whereas other platforms overcomplicate things. It's quick to use, has a low learning curve, and ultimately allows us to get team content out faster, which has had a positive impact. Most importantly, the team has found it useful and enjoys using the product to share their posts.

The support team are excellent and always answer queries promptly. They are very helpful.

We selected Pentana because our neighbouring authorities are users and had spoken highly of the product and given us demonstrations; some of our staff were also familiar with Pentana when it was called Covalent. It seemed to be the best product on the market for monitoring risks, PIs and projects.

We looked at a number of employee advocacy platforms before deciding to go with Vulse. The first thing that stood out was the total cost, which was much lower than others and matched our budget. They don't charge for admin seats, onboarding, or training, which other vendors do. The simplicity of the platform helped us make this decision too; it offered everything we needed and looked easy to use.

• Pentana Risk has allowed my team to focus on other areas of work whereas before we would be manually chasing for updates on PIs and risk. Pentana Risk does the chasing for us!
• We are able to produce reports for audit purposes very easily, rather than sending spreadsheets which is what we used to do.
• New managers can easily inherit risks, projects and PIs and see all of this on a custom portal, saving them time when they start.